Customising your website's Icon in IE5

Replace the boring IE logo in your readers browser with an icon customised for your site.

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Introduction

It's always nice to differentiate your site from others, and there a couple of places
in particular that allow you to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Dragging a URL from the address bar of Internet Explorer onto your desktop creates
a shortcut with the familiar blue and white IE shortcut icon:

Adding a site to your favorites brings a similar result.

If your readers are viewing your site through Internet Explorer 5.0 or above then
you can make your site stand out for them by simply creating a 16 x 16 pixel bitmap
called favicon.ico
(using the Visual Studio icon editor, for example) and placing this icon in your web site's
root directory.

As soon as the user adds the site to their favorites then IE will scan that website for
the favicon.ico and use it instead of the standard IE icon for desktop shortcuts,
the address bar, the 'Favorites' drop down menu in IE, the shortcut bar in the taskbar (Win 98+
and Windows 2000), and in the Office Shortcut bar.

You can associate a different icon with a specific page by adding a LINK
statement to the HEAD of your page:

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About the Author

Chris is the Co-founder, Administrator, Architect, Chief Editor and Shameless Hack who wrote and runs The Code Project. He's been programming since 1988 while pretending to be, in various guises, an astrophysicist, mathematician, physicist, hydrologist, geomorphologist, defence intelligence researcher and then, when all that got a bit rough on the nerves, a web developer. He is a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP both globally and for Canada locally.

His programming experience includes C/C++, C#, SQL, MFC, ASP, ASP.NET, and far, far too much FORTRAN. He has worked on PocketPCs, AIX mainframes, Sun workstations, and a CRAY YMP C90 behemoth but finds notebooks take up less desk space.

He dodges, he weaves, and he never gets enough sleep. He is kind to small animals.

Chris was born and bred in Australia but splits his time between Toronto and Melbourne, depending on the weather. For relaxation he is into road cycling, snowboarding, rock climbing, and storm chasing.